Introduction

For a short story to lure me in, I need one thing: great voice. If your narrator and/or character doesn’t have a unique or bizarre voice, I’m back to Netflix or staring at my neighbour across the road arguing with his bins. A convincing voice is, of course, tied up naturally with character, and character tumbles along neatly with plot, and plot is a close mate of pacing… so it begins for me with a solid grip on voice, ending in that last satisfying fork of risotto. Sometimes, in the pursuit of superior smarts, writers forget to actually spin a story, to entertain. Don’t flaunt your medial prefrontal cortex and disregard the notion of the big fat lie. That’s what fiction is after all. Short stories genuinely excite me and I’m happy so many people are committed to writing them. Here’s some of my favourites.

‘Soul Mate’ by Viv McDade

Voice and character intertwine to stably showcase instability in the barmiest way. “Had it not been for my new bedroom curtains, a lovely design of cornflowers on cream cotton, none of this might have happened.” A blame-game protagonist at odds with the world and devoid of personal boundaries. This story is a brilliant cringe-fest of terrible behaviour, but McDade works hard to get the reader to fall into the empathy trap. She utilises backstory to show some of the character’s more troubling personality developments throughout her working life in offices, and thematically connects those with the present situation unfolding. It makes the story very well-rounded. The pacing is hectic, but there are also plenty of breathers to allow us to recover too. It’s voyeuristic, uncomfortable, and massively comical. The climax is hilarious and the ending, well, it’s very much an anti-resolution but that’s OK. We know enough about the character at this stage to imagine how she’s going to conduct herself in the future, and it’ll never be a sunny day her way. ‘Soul Mate’ is a masterclass in voice, characterisation and pitch-perfect pacing.

First published in The New Yorker, December 1963, and collected in the anthology Let’s Be Alone Together, ed. Declan Meade, Stinging Fly Press, Sep 2008

‘Last Thing’ by Janice Galloway

“We were coming coming back from the pictures with half a packet of sweeties still coming round the corner at the Meadowside with Mary saying she was feart to go up the road herself…” is the first gasping line of this searingly sad and harrowing story spun in a child’s voice. In just five short pages with no full stops, we bear witness to two little kids attempting the journey home after a trip to the cinema, with abject danger on the approach from behind. It makes me genuinely sad reading this, like poring over the details of a news story about a missing woman, or watching a disturbing documentary. The lack of grammar intensifies the tension; the unbearable innocence of a child who’s ‘not quite right’ in the head (perhaps?) and then the last two pages, where words take on a tormenting typography in poetic form. Galloway is a genius at realistic (and phonetic) voices, the ones that are underrepresented in literature, i.e. working class invectives. Her first collection of stories platforming these unfamiliar pitches was published in 1990, a year before Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and three years before Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. For me she’s the forerunner of the power of slangerature; flinging voice unashamedly onto the page as lived and as it sounds. You’ll be hard pushed to find pointless ‘nodding’ Victoriana in her effortless sentences. Just brilliant.

First published in Where You Find It, Jonathan Cape, 1996, also in Collected Stories, Vintage, 2009

‘Bullet in the Brain’ by Tobias Wolff

As this shenanigans is called ‘a personal anthology’ and short stories are resolutely about (or connected to) trauma, I wanted to share a story that reflects a shock I got this summer. A friend of forty years – who lived abroad – died suddenly of cardiac arrest and I was talking to her within the same hour she passed. It was such a blow to all of us who knew, loved (and worried about) her and I keep thinking of Bullet in the Brainever since. My dear friend was a medical practitioner and I tortured myself wondering if she knew what was happening in the ten seconds or so before falling unconscious? The slowing down of time, those last frantic flashes and ticks. Here too, inside a lean but taut 1,885 words, a man suffers a bodily trauma he’s no hope of overcoming. Unlike my friend however, he goads the situation into being in the first place. He’s a completely unpleasant character, who happens to be in a bank, in the midst of an aggravated robbery, and he can’t keep his sarcastic gob shut. When the inevitable happens Woolf experiments with time and space, physics and memory, to give us a ‘film of my life’ that’s fairly unforgettable. Incredible idea.

First published in The New Yorker, September 1995 and available to read here; collected in The Night in Question, Knopf / Picador, 1996

‘Norma’ by Alan McMonagle

Alan is a terrible writer. Let me explain: he introduces you to off-kilter characters, sets them up in (sometimes, not always) outrageous scenarios, then he clears off to leave you with them parasitically teeming in your head. What a shitty thing to do! The narrator in ‘Norma’ has chosen a Bartleby-type job for the summer over fruit picking in France. Constantly penning resignation letters but never sending them, his saving grace is Norma, the canteen lady (who’s previously worked in a strip club: “They really liked my cinnamon buns…”). Her sexual exploits soon take over, and he becomes complicit in her office affairs, acting as alibi. As ‘Norma,’ the short story progresses, our narrator sinks more and more into a funk: gives weekends over to reading books of lists, lets his appearance slide. I don’t do spoilers, but there’s a bit where Norma and the narrator are on a smoke break and she recalls one time she watches an air balloon drifting off into the sky, but doesn’t finish that story…

First published in The Pig’s Back 2, 2022

‘Violets’ by Edna O’Brien

I’m writing this from a writers’ retreat in France that also doubles-up as a superb cookery school, and while I was looking for something else, I came across Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. An American chef telling Americans how to do it, but on a French bookshelf. Before she became a beloved tv-chef (as played by Meryl Streep), Julia Child was a secret agent of sorts, and ‘invented’ – by doshing various potions into pots – a liquid that repelled sharks from submarines (still in use today!). But also, Child was a frustrated writer (by her own admission) who wanted stories published in The New Yorker, but instead remained a lifelong reader. She fronted a series of radio shows on fiction and food, and it is here I first heard Edna O’Brien’s ‘Violets’, as read by the author herself. There’s not much going on plot-wise (‘well, fuck the plot!’, as Edna once said) – a woman is cooking and preparing her house to receive a “male visitor” – but by god, how exquisite this is. It becomes a Proustian meditation on love.

First published in The New Yorker, 5 November 1979, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories, 1984; the radio show with Julia Child and Edna as guest can be listened to here

‘justice for one’ by James Kelman

Discombobulation, awkwardness, the throng of the crowd, and a terminally annoying interloper. There’s a random guy on a march no-one wants to talk to. He streams in from nowhere (possibly drunk) and doesn’t know what’s going on or why he’s there. He’s the embodiment of the universal asshole asking stupid questions and contributing nothing. “On all sides folk were walking past. They moved quickly. Some were coming so close I felt a draught from their body, going to bang into me. Somebody said, The army are there and they are waiting for us. I shouted, I beg yer pardon! Take yer hand off my arm, cried a man.” He likes to annoy women taking part too. He can’t stop butting in. He’s creepy and ineffectual, hassling people, pulling at elbows. “I could see another couple of people looking at me; they too were suspicious. I shook my head at them, as if I was just seeing them for the first time.” In the end he does what all goons do and follows the tribe into whatever strange hell looms.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 12, Volume 2 and also collected in The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story, ed. Philip Hensher, Penguin, 2019

‘Fox 8’ by George Saunders

It’s not just about a canny dreamer of a fox who learns how to speak ‘Yuman’ by doing a Little Matchstick Girl stunt outside a house not far from his Den… Oh no! It’s also a mind-map of how to tell stories (as in, how to put one together). The word ‘story’ is mentioned 16 times. “One leson I lerned during my nites at that Yuman window was: a gud riter will make the reeder feel as bad as the Yuman does in there Story. Like the riter will make you feel as bad as Sinderela. You will feel sad you cannot go to the danse. And mad you have to sweep. You will feel like biting Stepmother on her Gown. Or, if you are Penokio, you will feel like: I wud rather not be made of wud. I wud rather be made of skin, so my father Jipeta will stop hitting me with a hamer. And so farth.” Saunders like to ‘play’ and through Fox 8’s newfound understanding of how people anthropomorphise, we get to see how ridiculous our approach to life really is. Then there’s our grotesque co-dependency with capitalism, running alongside our complete dislocation from nature. The narrator is funny, naïve, dreamy and cute. But he’s too trusting. His fellow foxes are losing their habitat, there’s no food to be had, everything is changing and dying and when one of his mates meets a brutal end, Fox 8 tries to address humanity. There’s pure wild entrepreneurship to how Saunders dives into his stories, the beauty of his world-building, blatant havoc and he how jumps back out again laughing. “Now, one thing I lerned from Storys is, when something big is about to okur, a riter will go: Then it hapened!” I think Saunders missed a trick through, Fox 8 should’ve talked directly to him at the end.

First published in The Guardian, 21st October, 2017, and in print as a standalone, Fox 8, Bloomsbury, 2018

‘Feeling Gravity’s Pull’ by Colm O’Shea

“Now I return, and I watch myself as I was then. Now I stand over myself like Cassiel in Berlin, a mute guardian angel, or like a cold monument over a grave. Now I watch myself as I was then, and I know what is going to come.” The setting here in an innocuous AirBnb room above a business premises opposite a phone shop somewhere in Dublin. And the situation is framed in secrecy. O’Shea uses repetition to ram home the horror of a single moment that changes a relationship forever. This entire story is a fresco of grief. The simple technique of going back in and in and in to the layers, while seeing or revealing something new, is dizzying, unnerving. “Everything is slowly circling inwards, and I watch myself and I know I don’t realise it’s happening.” This close lens makes you feel like you’re witnessing something sacred (as well as terrible) and rather than feel embarrassed, it becomes a weird privilege. I have to confess Colm is a personal friend, but that usually means for writers: do not talk about or ask about the work! I don’t think I’ve ever told him this story makes me cry. He has a novel on the same theme, [Untitled]: A Meditation, described as a ‘work of experimental nonfiction,’ which is like spending a year inside this same story, forgetting how to come back out of it. Completely unique and immersive.

First published as part of The Stinging Fly online fiction series, September 13, 2023. You can read it here and listen to Mary O’Donoghue discuss it with Nicole Flattery here

‘Unstitching’ by Camilla Grudova

A feminist revolution in a tiny space and that’s all a feminist insurgency needs. Two pages and one line. A woman decides to ‘unstitch’ her whole skin after a cup of coffee one random afternoon. It sets a domino chain in action of other women doing the same. “Her clothes, skin and hair fell from her like the peeled rind of fruit, and her true body stepped out.” The men aren’t happy, of course, because they don’t know what they’re now looking at or dealing with. “When Greta’s husband came home he was horrified. He had never touched her sewing machine before – it frightened him – and he would certainly not touch Greta’s newly discovered body.” The details become increasingly bizarre, but serenely so, until later in the story sewing machines are outlawed and the evolution towards full unstitching consciousness begins. It’s magic-realism you can both imagine and happily fail to imagine. I remember when this book came out, people were quietly in awe. It’s one of those stories that signed me up as a reader of Grudova’s work for life.

First published in The Doll’s Alphabet, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017

‘Stars and Saints’ by Lucia Berlin

A story about first impressions (going wrong) told in digestible vignettes. “There was no way that I could explain that it all happened so fast, that I wasn’t smiling away at the cats chewing the birds. It was that my happiness about the sweet peas and the finches hadn’t had time to fade.” This is the character’s response to a psychiatrist seeing her smile at a cat eating some birds. Not the usual intensely comic or clipped voice that we expect from Berlin, it’s a little more deprived and sardonic. A litany of small shames forms a story of a young woman who can’t do right from doing wrong. She is endlessly defensive, all the things going wrong in her life have nothing to do with her! They happen without her input, she just happens to keep being there. People are misreading the situation. I love stories that examine agency in this way. She decides at some point to become a Catholic which causes her mother and grandfather to have a fit and the story morphs to a schoolscape, where Sister Cecilia takes her on a wild ride, or vice versa. Crazy characters like this make me feel more at peace somehow.

Collected in A Manual for Cleaning Women, Picador, 2015

‘The Pink House’ by Rebecca Curtis

This is one of those ball of wool yarns with lots of separate unravels, each more annoying (but fun) than the preceding one. On the surface it’s a tale about a wannabe writer at an artist’s retreat orating to other creatives during a dinner party (all of whom are strangers) about the time she may have ruined a man’s life. But perhaps it’s also a story about the cursed relationship with uncaring or distant parents, and those consequences playing out over time. Or maybe it’s just a cut-and-dried ghost story where psychogeography and a possession take centre stage? The plot does get a bit silly in parts, but that adds to the fun. Like a lot of New Yorker stories, it’s long (8,882 words), multilayered and has a peculiar circularity in its execution. It might even be a gimmick, but I loved how unreliable the narrator was and how dismissive and nasty the guests became. I felt sorry for the male character, his face and body becoming ‘so viscerally pink, like underdone pork loin’ and he never got to finish that novel. Towards the end “the people at the [dinner] table yawned. They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying.” A fun story.

First published in The New Yorker, June 23, 2014, and available to subscribers to read here

‘We Are Appalling’ by Keith Ridgway

Absolutely for the day (and date) that’s in it, I’m ending on this unlikely alliance between a gay man and his asexual female partner, who make a ‘better life’ decision to leave London for a spooky crumbling house in the countryside, located beside a stinking chicken facility. There are echoes of Joyce with a mantra of “all the dead are loved, and all the loved are dead” throughout, and despite fat hints from the very first sentence as to what might’ve gone down, we really don’t have a clue by the end. The first time I read it I had to jump back in straightaway and go again. When I bring it into writing workshops, the punters are confused. They love the writing, but are annoyed there’s no real definitive answers to go home with. What the bejaysus is actually going on? Keith is a writer who loves to play with the reader’s head and you can see he’s having a lot of fun here. I love how contemporary it is though, how as a writer he is firmly rooted in the world as we know and recognise it. Summer passed, summer passed, but we find out summer had not passed. What happened to these characters in-between? “It was six hours to London and Bert suspected they had made a mistake. It was not that it was unpleasant. The house was old and draughty and they had spent the first several nights terrified of noises and silence, shadows and doors. But that had settled, and it was comfortable—in a new way of thinking about comfort—and resolutely quiet. No airplanes. No traffic. No people.” As Bert is dreaming of London and dreaming of all its men, Marianne stays put with Pinecone (the dog), soaking up the bad smells and weird going-ons. Back in the city Bert attempts to hook up with old friends on an app (and plans to check in with his agent), but instead gets caught up in literal and metaphorical rooms, in conversations that may or may not be happening, and texts that seem to make no sense when they land. By the time he gets back to Marianne and things are moving around the house in thin air, there’s a combined feeling of anxiety and panic. What is that that little bell that rings so “clear and loud and joyful” and where is Marianne’s niece Lisa? Keith needs to spill the beans on this story, but you just know he won’t.

First published in The Stinging Fly, Issue 41, Volume 2: Winter 2019-20